- Classrooms and operating theatres in many low and middle-income countries (LMICs) do not have access to fast, affordable Internet.
- Without Internet, a large proportion of current educational resources are unavailable to teachers and learners in the most vulnerable classrooms.
- Lack of access to educational material is a significant barrier to expanding the number of qualified healthcare workers in LMICs
- Lack of anesthesia providers is one of the most severe healthcare workforce shortages worldwide
- Online educational material (e.g. e-books, quizbanks, videos, lectures, slides etc) have become the most common forms of media that anesthesia trainees and teachers utilize
- By increasing access to high-quality educational material we can accelerate efforts to expand the skilled anesthesia workforce and improve access to anesthesia and analgesia worldwide
About the Device
The Center for Health Equity in Surgery and Anesthesia together with multiple partners including World Possible, is piloting “Anesthesia Classroom in A Box (ACIB)” – a wireless access point that contains the highest-quality, most current, peer reviewed anesthesia educational material. These devices will host up to 1TB of data, run on AC power or built in battery backup and provide free, fast, unlimited access to content for up to 50 simultaneous users. The ACIB device is the size of your hand, will be placed in a classroom or hospital and create a local WiFi network which users can access. Once on the network, users can access all content via a web browser on any computer, tablet or smartphone. It feels similar to accessing the Internet though no Internet connection is necessary. The device uses World Possible’s plug-and-play server software platform ‘RACHEL’ (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education & Learning).
Project Status
Plans for the ACIB pilot were impacted by COVID19. During the pandemic, with support from USAID-STAR the focus of the project shifted to pilot distribution of ~10 devices in Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and Zimbabwe to distribute COVID19 critical care education materials. Once we have user feedback from the pilot we intend to publish instructions on this page for how to create your own ACIB with custom content, including the option to draw from the library we have compiled and curated.
To support, collaborate or find out more about this project, contact us.
